“Glyphs were never just a writing system," Anson Hunter said. "They were divine words. It’s for this reason that the scribes were fearful that certain words could have a malignant power and become uncontrollable forces in the tomb and so they would cut off the head of a lion in a glyph, or truncate a serpent or show spears stuck in the back of a crocodile in order to render it harmless. The hieroglyphs in the Stela of Thoth were the most potent of all. When spoken they were not just sounds, but glyphs graven on the air, real things and entities, image-meanings that took shape and activated a world of unseen forces and alternate reality. Heka, or Egyptian magic."

“So you believe Egyptian magic has power to influence the real world?”

“Can a certain sequence of words and actions, such as imitation, the replication of a name, image or mythical event produce an event in the real world? I believe there is an unseen connectedness between things and by tuning in to this network of likenesses you can attract like outcomes. The trick is to find that invisible skein and draw on it, hence the Egyptians’ use of puns, analogy, mimesis, acrostics, dualities and the like. These links are things beyond logic, like the dream realm where parallel sounds, symbols and stories, while seeming bizarre, hold an inner, often unseen connection with our lives.”

"When it was assigned to draft a constitution for the newly established Islamic Republic of Iran thirty years ago, the Assembly of Experts made sure that the sovereignty of the people would NOT be the government’s source of legitimacy."

"According to the Assembly’s intention, the supreme leader’s absolute power over the whole government emanates NOT from the people, but rather from the divine authority of the Twelfth (or Hidden) Imam, which is delegated to the supreme leader during the Imam’s miraculous occlusion."

and:

"Elections, therefore, are mere administrative procedures whose legitimacy depends upon the preelection vetting of the candidates and the postelection approval of the results by the unelected, cleric-dominated Council of Guardians."

As one student blogger activist put it after the June 2009 election farce, "We made a mistake...."

The students had assumed that there was some degree of popular sovereignty dormant in the 1979 Constitution, a sovereignty that they thought the electorate might snap into wakefulness by voting en masse.

"We made a mistake," wrote a bitter Zeid Abadi. "We refused to accept that the regime is not animated by the same logic which presides over our understanding."

The West has made a huge mistake also. In their fear of one evil empire, an evil ideology, they used a worse ideology to counter and fight it, empowering it with Western Technology and supplying it with arms. and money, both in Foreign Aid and income for oil and opium/heroin.

There's a mess going on in the Middle East right now, with all the revolutions and protests, some violently suppressed. and they all might have extremely similar problems with their national constitutions, if they have any at all.

Has it dawned on them that mixing i-slam with their constitutional laws might be the problem, or a major part of it?

In the case of the Iranian Constitution, one can see that if this is a democracy, it is ruled by the minority, the ayatollahs and all their little brother mullahs.

In another GulfNews opinion piece, the tussle between the Iranian president and the 'Supreme Leader' is laid out, over who gets to vet the candidates for President and their parliament. But the problem for Iranians remains the same, those in power decide who can run and who cannot. There are no free elections, political parties, or newspapers. AND this is all constitutionally legal.